Found on 2026-10-10 by a search the owner asked for: a documented case of a change of audience without translation, with uptake documented in both audiences. It is partial. The search asked for identical wording, and this token is an image.
The case
Jon Ronson’s account, from interviews with Stone eighteen months later (The Guardian, 21 February 2015):
- The frame. Off duty, Stone and her colleague Jamie Schuh “had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, ‘smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose.’” At Arlington “we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.” Stone posed “pretending she was shouting and swearing – flipping the bird, and with her hand to her open mouth.” Schuh posted it on Facebook and tagged her, “thinking we were funny”.
- The first audience: their Facebook friends. “A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. ‘One had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, “This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s tasteless.”’” Stone answered: “Whoa! It’s just us being douchebags! Forget about it!”
- The change of audience. Schuh’s mobile uploads “weren’t private”. Four weeks later the photo reached strangers.
- The second audience. “‘Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars’, ‘You should rot in hell’”. A “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page “attracted 12,000 likes”. She lost her job.
- The speaker. “I wanted to scream: ‘It was just about a sign’”. Her statement at the time, as NBC4 Washington reported it from Gawker (21 November 2012): “challenging authority in general … OBVIOUSLY we meant NO disrespect”.
What is held fixed is the token: one photograph, one post. What changes is the audience, from people who “know you girls” and the running joke to the public.
What it can show
That a change of audience alone can change the act verdict, with no translation and no change to the token. For friends it was a joke in poor taste, from people they knew. For strangers it was an expression of contempt for the dead. The in-group reading depends on a frame, the series of photos that disobey signs, which the second audience did not hold.
That is CLAIM-224’s point met without translation. The objection says a translation changes the audience and the norms, and that whether the act survives then turns on a correspondence of relations that neither structure supplies. Here the words are not changed at all. The correspondence that fails is between audience roles. CLAIM-151 version 2 answers that a new audience in the same role keeps the constituent. The case shows the residue: the strangers did not occupy the friends’ role, and nothing in the token said which role a viewer was in. It also falls outside CLAIM-091’s model of translation, which holds the audience fixed. It illustrates and bears no weight.
What it cannot show
The condition it fails: identical wording. The token is a photograph, a gesture beside a sign. Whether the post had a caption is unverified. So it shows a change of audience for an image, not for words, and it is filed as partial for that reason.
The split is not clean. The first audience did not take it as harmless. The friends’ verdict was “kind of offensive” and “tasteless”: a joke in poor taste. The strangers’ verdict was an act of disrespect. Both come through Stone’s recollection eighteen months later, and the friends’ comments are not independently archived.
The strongest reply. The strangers attributed a different intention (“hates the military”), so an intention-based account (CLAIM-221) says they misread a joke, and the act was the joke throughout. The friend who knew the intention (“I know you girls”) still judged it, but judged its taste, not its category. So the case shows that verdicts move with the audience. It does not show that the audience’s role is constitutive rather than evidential.
What would close the gap. A reader test that holds the photo fixed and varies only the viewer’s relation to the series, as a change of situation, do(S), not an instruction, do(I) (CLAIM-130). One group sees it in a feed after the earlier no-smoking-sign photo, as the friends did. Another sees it alone. A third sees it alone with the note “this was a joke”. Raters judge the act category (joke, insult, contempt), separately from taste and from the intention they attribute. The photo and the two comment sets could serve as items for CASE-055, as an arm with no rendering. A verbal companion would meet the wording condition: a documented in-group remark later quoted to outsiders. The search found none verified.
The Sacco tweet, unverified. Justine Sacco’s tweet of 20 December 2013 (“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”) has the wording this case lacks. It is mentioned here only as unverified. The primary account (Ronson, New York Times Magazine, February 2015) could not be reached. The text and the follower count rest on secondary summaries, and the first audience’s uptake is not documented in anything the search read.
Sources
- J. Ronson, “‘Overnight, everything I loved was gone’: the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone”, The Guardian, 21 February 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson. Read directly; the quotations were checked against it on 2026-10-10. It is an extract from Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Picador, 2015), ISBN 9781447229797, which was not read.
- E. Gonzalez, “Facebook firestorm after woman shares mocking Arlington photo”, NBC4 Washington, 21 November 2012, https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/national-international/natl-dc-facebook-firestorm-after-woman-shares-mocking-arlington-photo/2035446/. Read only through a fetch summary; the wording of Stone’s 2012 statement is unverified.
- J. Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life”, New York Times Magazine, 12 February 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html. Not reached. The Sacco details rest on secondary summaries.
- A. E. Marwick and d. boyd, “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately”, New Media & Society 13(1) (2011), 114–133, DOI 10.1177/1461444810365313. Background on context collapse; the abstract only was read, and it documents no single remark with uptake in two audiences.
Note of 2026-10-10: a same-wording case
A second search, which the owner asked for, found the verbal companion this case lacked: CASE-061, filed as its variant. In the State of the Union of 2003 George W. Bush used “wonder-working power”, the refrain of an 1899 hymn, verbatim; churchgoers who knew the hymn heard the power of Christ, others heard boilerplate, and Albertson’s experiment with an ingroup and a religiously diverse outgroup measured the split. It meets “identical wording”, which this case does not. It meets the change of audience less well than this case does: the speech’s audience was mixed at once, and the split was designed by the speaker rather than reached by a later repost. The intention-based reply bears on it at least as hard as on this one. This case stands as the accidental, image-borne instance; the new one is the verbal, deliberate one.